God Calls Us To Share Our Faith - Three Ways He Will Help Us

The title of the sermon this morning is, God calls us to share our faith. Three ways He will help us.

Let’s take a quick poll this morning. The poll is about your attitudes and mine toward the topic of evangelism - sharing your faith. I’m going to share with you a series of statements that sum up our attitudes toward sharing our faith, and you raise your hand if it’s true of you. Sharing your faith means giving 1) your personal testimony of how God saved you, and 2) a presentation of the gospel.

How many of you would agree with these statements. And here’s the rule: If you’re be honest with me about where you’re, I’ll also share with you honestly about where I’m at.

“I want to share my faith with others, and I regularly do share my faith with others.”

“I want to share my faith with others, and I regularly do share my faith others.”

“I want to share my faith with others, and I know I should, but I don’t do so nearly as often as I should.”

“I want to share my faith with others, and one day I will, but just not today.”

“I want to share my faith with others, but I have no intention to do so.”

“I don’t want to share my faith with others, and I have no intention to do so.”

Now, for those of you who answered with any hesitation at all about sharing your faith, here’s the question...

How many of you would say that the reason you answered with hesitation is that evangelism can be scary?

Now, fear is a natural human response to a real or perceived threat. And the thing that makes evangelism seem to be a threat is all the uncertainty associated with it, right?

“Will they be receptive to me? Or will they reject my attempt? Will we mess things up or get it right? What if I can’t answer their questions? What if they get upset with me? If it’s someone I know and love, how will this change my relationship with them?

Another way, actually, of asking those questions is to ask this question: “Can I trust God? Will He show up, or leave me hanging?’

God calls us to share our faith. Acts 8:25-40 answers this question by giving us three ways He will help us.

#1: God will draw lost men and women from all nations

There’s just been a massive spiritual awakening in Samaria. Philip went and preached the gospel of forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ. The Spirit is moving and men and women are being saved in large numbers. So from Samaria, they begin to return to home base for the early church, Jerusalem. And we’ll read down through verse 27, which is our focus for this point:

Acts 8:25–26 ESV

Now when they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans. Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is a desert place.

Now, look with me at verse 27: “And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her worship.”

The Ethiopian eunuch:

He was different ethnically

He was different racially

He was different physically

He was the first Gentile convert!

God will draw men and women from all nations to Himself. This Ethiopian guy here is a case study in God’s desire to draw men and women from not just Israel, but from every nation to Himself. How so?

Notice on your screen four things about this Ethiopian. First, he was different ethnically. Ethiopia in the NT is not modern-day Ethiopia. This is modern-day Sudan, south Africa. He’s different ethnically.

But he’s also different racially. The word “Ethiopian” here in Acts literally means “to have burned skin”, “to have a burned face”. Ethiopians were dark skinned; they were African, which means they were black. So he was also different racially.

Now, the Israelites for centuries had believed themselves to belong to God simply because they could trace their genealogy back to the patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Gentiles, non-Jews, they were dismissed without even a thought.

And yet, we serve a God who is so very, very different in His love for people from all nations. And that’s why there’s a surprising detail in verse 27. Look with me at the end of the verse: “He had come to Jerusalem to worship.” Why is that surprising? It’s surprising because of Deut. 23:1.

Deuteronomy 23:1 ESV

“No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord.

That passage is talking about a eunuch. Well, what’s a eunuch? A eunuch is a man whose reproductive organs are intentionally mutilated. And eunuchs - well, they were barred from worship in the OT because they were physically mutilated. There’s even question whether he was even able to go into the temple in Jerusalem. He definitely wouldn’t have been allowed to worship with the Jews. He would have had to enter the separate, second-class space since he was a Gentile.

And this Ethiopian — different ethnically, different racially, different physically because he was a eunuch — this eunuch God is drawing to Himself. God is saying to this eunuch, “No more of this second class worship…you are important to me; you have worth and value; I want you for myself.”

This was promised in the OT, by the way - that God would one day draw those types of people who had been rejected as ceremonially impure.

Isaiah 56:3–5 ESV

Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”; and let not the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

God is concerned not just about the masses of people, but also each individual person as they were the only one!

We talk about the lost often, as a category; the unsaved, etc. And anyone who is out fellowship with God through Christ is indeed lost and unsaved. But the danger is we think of the lost as a category of people who are nameless and faceless. The Ethiopian eunuch is a reminder to us: God sees each and every person, and He cares. God sees you, and He cares about you. He knows your name, He knows your heart, He knows your desires and your fears — all of that, and He still loves you. God is concerned not just about the masses of people; He is concerned also about each individual person as if they were the only one.

When we share our faith with others, we can trust that the person we are sharing Christ with is being drawn by the Father. We are dead in sins and unable to lift a finger, unable to believe, unable to repent, until God in grace draws us. Jesus says in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”

God draws men and women from every nation to Himself.

#2: God will cause our paths to intersect with theirs

But here’s the next promise: not only will God draw the lost from every nation to Himself; He will also cause our paths to intersect with theirs. And sometimes we have experiences of just this very thing.

There was a pastor and Bible scholar named Ian Thomas. He had been traveling and was about to catch his final connecting flight home. He was so tired that he planned to try to curl up and sleep through the duration of his flight. But a few minutes into it, he says that the guy across the aisle started trying to get his attention. And just like the Ethiopian eunuch, he said, “I am reading in the Bible about Nicodemus in John 3, and I do not understand it. Do you know anything about the Bible?”

Literally the guy is a Bible scholar who teaches and studies the Bible for a living. And here’s someone across the aisle reading John 3 about being born again. “”Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3 ESV), Jesus says in that passage. And seated across from a Bible scholar, he says, “Hey, I want to understand this. Do you perhaps happen to know anything about the Bible? [Hughes PTW loc. cit.]

How many of you have actually experienced something like that? If you have, I would love to hear the story and even write it down and file it away for the future.

But I wonder if the reason we don’t have more of these experiences, church, is that we’re inconvenienced by them? After all, if God is going to cause my paths to intersect with a lost person’s path that He’s drawing, that’s a traffic jam for our schedule, right? My arrival time at my appointment might have to be 2:30 and not 2pm, or maybe even rescheduled. We’re also very tired, over committed often to good things, and many of us go through life already feeling drained, like we have nothing to give.

Well, let’s turn our attention to Philip, shall we? Remember verse 25? Look there with me, will you? “Now when they had returned and spoken the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem.” Philip was on his way somewhere, too - Jerusalem. Or at least he had just arrived there and hadn’t really planned on going back out again. But Philip was open to the Lord rearranging his plans. How do we know that? The whole reason Philip was even in Samaria to begin with was that persecution had broken out in Jerusalem, and many people fled. Philip was one of them. But even as Philip fled persecution, He was looking for opportunities to evangelize, to share his faith. Even as he’s on his way back, what is he doing? Look at the second part of verse: “when they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans.”

But as soon as he gets back there, God leads him back again, and this time it really is inconvenient. Look at verse 26: “Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Rise and go toward the south, to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’” And whether it’s Luke who adds this little detail for us or the angel who spoke it, this clarification was given: “This is a desert place.”

You could translate that word “desert” a few different ways. It might mean “wilderness”, in which case the word reminds us of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness and of the Israelites who wondered in the wilderness. There’s also some discussion about whether “south” in that verse should be translated “south” or whether it should be translated “noon.” If noon, this is the hottest time of the day to be going into the desert or the wilderness.

It sometimes surprises me how willing God is to ask us to inconvenience ourselves. The Spirit of God led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted for 40 days, during which time he ate nothing. The Holy Spirit led Paul to Jerusalem where Paul and everyone else knew he would be arrested at least, maybe killed at worst. Still he went. There are many other stories in the Bible that have this same feature, too.

I’m curious about this, guys. How many of you married men out there know that your wife has a voice that she uses, a tone, a phrase, or whatever it is, that she uses with you when she’s about to ask you to inconvenience yourself? We love our wives and over the years, hopefully, we grow to the point where serving our wives becomes our delight.

And over time, too, our love for God grows. And when he asks us to inconvenience ourselves for His glory and the good of someone else, or when he perhaps asks us to endanger ourselves for His glory and the good of someone else, we grow in our willingness to say yes. The more we grow in sanctification and Christlikeness, the more our heart beats in rhythm with his; his desires become ours; his priorities become ours.

What does Philip do in response to God’s call, verse 27: “and he arose and went.” “Yes, Lord.” “Here I am. Send me.” And the Lord honors Philip’s unquestioning obedience. How does He honor him? Well, we might just not notice because it’s so subtle in the next part of that verse. It’s just one word. It’s a word, in fact, that in alot of modern translations is just often left out by the translators as being archaic. But it’s so important. It’s the word “behold.”

“Behold” is an older word that means “look! see!” And when we see it in the Bible, it almost always aims at drawing our attention to something, and often from the perspective of the main character or the speaker. So here too. Philip tells us that in response to God’s command to go toward Gaza, in the middle of the day, in the blazing heat, on a deserted road in the middle of a desert wasteland - in response to that command Philip “arose and went”. And here’s what we read next: “And behold, an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure.”

Behold! What do ya know? Right at that moment, Philip gets up and goes! And who should he meet? What kind of person should cross his path, but a non-Jew! And a eunuch non-Jew, at that! He’s been worshiping in Jerusalem at the temple, even though he was kept off to the side. And now, lo and behold, he’s reading a copy of the scroll of Isaiah! And not just any passage in Isaiah; the most Jesus-centered, gospel-saturated part of the the book of Isaiah, that of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53. Cam you believe all of these circumstances have come together to produce this opportunity.

That’s what the word “behold” means there. Could you imagine a better turn of events? Talk about being in the right place at the right time!

Philip obeyed God’s command, and Philip is honored and rewarded by being the man who wins the first Gentile soul to Jesus!

This is the very first time the gospel crosses the geographic and cultural border from Jew to full-fledged non-Jew. This has been God’s plan all along. God was never content to be in relationship only with the Israelites! They were never the end-goal. The whole world was the end-goal. God will have a people from every nation, tribe, tongue and language to worship Him for eternity. It is His delight to draw them to Himself. It is His delight to cause our paths to intersect with theirs. …Is it our delight as well?

God draws men and women from all nations to Himself. God causes our paths to intersect with theirs. And lastly, God will use His word to bring about their salvation.

#3: He will use His word to bring about their salvation

The American Bible Society each year produces what it calls the annual State of the Bible survey. And what they found is that Americans are reading their Bibles less and less.

This year, they found that 26 million Americans stopped reading the Bible regularly between 2021 and 2022. It is the largest drop on record. But that’s not even the most surprising thing about it. The most stunning statistic from that study is that only 10% of Americans say they read their Bible daily.

But, here’s the problem: exposure to God’s word is how we grow as Christians. We don’t grow through reading Christian fiction. We don’t grow from watching Christian movies. You don’t even necessarily grow from sitting through the sermon or going to Sunday Morning Bible Study. You don’t even necessarily grow just from praying. You grow as you regularly, consistently, expose yourself to God’s word contained in the Bible.

How can I say that?

Romans 10:17 ESV

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

Faith — saving faith in Christ at the moment we believe — and a growing faith in Christ as we mature and grow — faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

Since we’re hearing so much lately about Russia, I thought I would share with you what the Russian Dictionary says about the Bible. How does the Russian Dictionary define the Bible:

“a collection of fantastic leg-ends without scientific support. It is full of dark hints, historical mistakes, and contradictions. It serves as a factor for gaining power and subjugating unknowing nations.” [Swindoll p46]

We grow in Christlikeness as we read the Bible.

That’s why the Ethiopian eunuch has the experience he has. He is reading the book of Isaiah, chapter 53, verses 7-8. Isaiah 53 is the great suffering servant passage. It’s the most vivid and complete picture of Jesus and what He would accomplish in the entire OT.

But the eunuch has a problem, and it’s a problem we can relate to.

He’s reading the Isaiah 53:7-8.

And Philip gets there right as he’s reading from that section, because God intersects Philip’s path with the eunuch’s path. And Philip asks him the question every Bible teacher and pastor loves to ask, which is: “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Ever felt that way about the Bible? It’s confusing. How can I understand it without help?

So Philip gets up in the carriage with him and they begin to read from Isaiah 53:7-8. And this is what it says:

This is what he reads: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation, justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”

“I mean, I understand the words themselves, but who’s Isaiah talking about? What is he talking about? Who is this sheep who suffers silently? Is the prophet talking about himself? Is Isaiah himself the lamb? That’s how some Jews understood it at the time. But why is justice denied him? Why is he treated unjustly? Is he standing in for someone else by taking their punishment? What does it mean that is life is taken away from the earth?”

And Luke doesn’t tell us what Philip’s answer to this specific question was. Rather, Luke wants us to know something more important, something bigger, verse 35: “Then Philip opened his mouth” - underscoring that what he’s about to say is life-changing, paradigm-shifting: “Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus.”

In other words, you don’t find Christ in the OT only when you turn to Isaiah 53. Philip began there, but he didn’t end there. He wanted the Ethiopian to see that all the Scripture in the OT points to Jesus. Beginning with Isa. 53, Philip shows the Ethiopian this Scripture and the rest of Scripture and using that Scripture he tells Philip the good news about Jesus.

All Scripture reveals Jesus to us. Genesis to Revelation reveals Him to us. The historical books and the law books tell us about Jesus. The poetry of Psalms and Proverbs and Job tell us about Jesus. The prophets — major and minor prophets, both the four and the 12 — tell us about Him. With one accord, all 66 books of the Bible reveal Christ to us in all His glory and beauty and love; they tell us of our need to be saved and His deep, authentic willingness to save.

Every law points to Jesus as the only One who obeyed it; every law points to Jesus as the One whose death provides forgiveness for our failure to obey it. Every king points to Jesus; good kings like David and Josiah and Solomon say, “Don’t look at us; we’re not the Messiah; one is coming who is infinitely better!” Bad kings like Manasseh and Ahab point to Jesus too. All their wickedness makes us long for a good, gracious, wise, God-fearing king, and that’s a longing that only Jesus can fulfill when He comes again. He’s present even at creation. Jesus Christ is the Word of God by which God spoke universes and galaxies into existence.

And as Philip shows this to the eunuch, He places faith in Christ and is born again. We don’t see the moment of His belief. Luke just shows us the result. “And as they were going along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, ‘See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” (Acts 8:36 ESV). Verse 37 is only found in the KJV and the NKJV. If you want to know what happened to it, talk to me after church. It’s not that other translations tried to hide it, though.

So they stop on the side of the road when they spot some water. A lot of Bible scholars say, Well that can’t be true because, you know, there’s no actual bodies of water on those roads today where he could be baptized. Is it not possible that there were some bodies of water 2,000 years ago that aren’t there today? And if not, do we not believe the Creator is able to provide such a body of water?

So the eunuch commands the chariot to stop. Luke tells us they both went down into the water. Philip baptized him by immersion. They came back up out of the water. And look at this verse, verse 39: “And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.”

By the way, the eunuch is a powerful man. He’s a high-ranking government official in his government. He’s the equivalent of a Finance Minister or Treasury Secretary. All the wealth and financial reserves of Ethiopia are entrusted to this man. He has tremendous influence in the upper echelons of the government. We can assume that he uses that sphere of influence for the glory of God.

And so they go their separate ways. Philip is carried away by the Spirit of the Lord, much like Elijah the prophet. And the eunuch leaves for Ethiopia, except this time he’s carrying something back with him that he didn’t have before: a new heart, and a message of God’s love and forgiveness by faith alone in Christ alone by grace alone.

Exalting Jesus in Acts How Ordinary People Live on Mission (Acts 8:26–40)

Whether you are visiting a coffee shop in your town, shopping in Walmart, coaching third base, talking to a person on an airplane, dialoging with internationals in your town, or conversing with the trick-or-treaters, you should prepare for evangelistic opportunities. The Lord of all the earth is offering salvation, and he often uses ordinary conversations to display the glory of his grace to unbelievers. We, in fact, are Christians today because someone shared the good news with us, so let’s live with sensitivity among those we encounter. God may use each of us to lead many others to him.

Conclusion and call for response

Matthew 28:18–20 ESV

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Now, church, I want every head turned turned this way and every eye locked onto mine:

Do you believe God can use you in this great work?

The great news is that God delights in using unlikely people to do great things for His glory and our good. God did not use an apostle, pastor, elder, bishop, or an angel for this job. He used Philip. God who spoke worlds into existence can do anything with anyone. And yet, He wants you and He wants me. Anyone can be part of God’s mission; He can use any willing heart, whether educated/trained/long-time church member.

This is His mission, church! Come to think of it, this is His building. It’s his money that is in our bank account. For that matter, we belong to Him, too — twice over! He created us, and then He re-created us in Christ. We are His. And that means His mission, our mission — our church’s mission — must be ours.

We have two goals as a church for the next two years: 1) Every Buffalo member becomes missions-aware; and 2) We establish a regular pattern of outreach to our immediate community.

So the question for each of us this morning is twofold: 1) How will I be involved? 2) And do I believe God will use me? Will He show up?

Yes, He will.

He will draw men and women from every nation to Himself.

He will cause our paths to intersect with theirs.

And He will use His word to spark saving faith in their hearts.